The Digital Photo Guy

Yes Virginia, There Really Are Burrowing Owls

After 3 fruitless years of searching, I finally found and photographed burrowing owls in the wild. In fact, within one hour, I saw 4 of the cute critters and managed to get a photo with two in one frame.

The originals of two are shown below. If you can’t efficiently and effectively create the above photos in a few minutes with Photoshop Elements, you’re not getting full value out of PSE. Notice how I removed twigs in front of the owls for a better photo. The third was just cropped and had curves adjusted.

Desert Spring Wildflowers

The temperatures started warming up in the desert on Friday, 3/12 so we should be in peak bloom this coming Saturday and Sunday. There’s still space in the workshop. Remember, past students receive a 10% discount on all classes.

Here are some photos from last week. We used wide angle lenses to make small flower patches appear huge as well as telephoto lenses to “stack” the scene so everything seems closer together. The students were most amazed at the world as seen through a macro lens and learning to control depth of field in macros.

For a great place to stay, I recommend a cute trailer at Leapin’ Lizard RV Ranch in Ocotillo Wells, just 15 miles from Borrego Springs. I discovered it this past week and am totally amazed at what Deborah and Siegfried Kunkler have built there. They even erected two 40′ WiFi antennas so the whole park has free WiFi. Best of all, the trailers are as little as $60/night.

Topaz Labs FREE Webinar, April 7

Eric Yang of Topaz Labs will present a FREE webinar on Wednesday, April 7 at noon Central Daylight Savings Time (CDT). That’s 1PM EDT, 11AM MDT and 10AM PDT. To register, click here. If there’s still room, you’ll receive an e-mail confirmation in a few days.

If you belong to a camera club or other group, you’re welcome to project the webinar on a screen for the whole group to view.

I’ve had several requests for the Cheat Sheet I published last year so I resurrected it. The purpose is two-fold. First, make the dSLR Cheat Sheet available to those who missed it the first time and second, point out the new, cool Search Box at the top of each page. As a test, I entered ‘cheat sheet’ and it immediately popped up several articles where I had mentioned the Cheat Sheet. Be sure to read the companion piece (registration required).

Lest you think I’ve suddenly gotten smart, let me disabuse you of such silly notions. I paid Paul Schroeder, a really smart guy in Luxembourg, to make changes. My participation was limited to writing design specs and sending payment. The trick when developing a website is to hire someone who is both a designer and a coder. Many great designers can’t write code to save their lives and many coders can’t design their way out of a paper bag. Paul’s designs tend to be light and airy but I felt comfortable he could adapt the dark theme used on this site. If you need a web site designer, contact Paul.

Why I Use Double-Opt-In for Registrations

I received feedback saying the double-opt-in registration was too much trouble so I’d like to tell you why I do that. First, I hate spam. I really, really hate, detest, loath and revile spam. Therefore, I don’t ever want to be accused of sending spam. Sometimes, people register and forget. Then, they receive e-mails from me and think I’m spamming them. A double-opt-in system reduces the chances of that happening. Second, mental midgets have been known to register others as a way to harass and annoy people. This avoids that problem. Third, robotic web scrapers roam the internet scraping content off web sites to be used for their own malicious purposes. I’ve found links to my site from sleazy operators for who-knows-what purpose.

It’s not my intent to make it difficult for readers to access this site but I feel I have a responsibility to make sure it’s safe and enjoyable. The double-opt-in system sends an e-mail to confirm that you really registered and that you’re a real person. The second e-mail containing the password is manually sent so it doesn’t always go out immediately.

A Stomach Churning Photoshoot

I’ve heard the difference between a Fairy Tale and a Southern Fairy Tale is that a Fairy Tale starts out, “Once upon a time…” while a Southern Fairy Tale starts, “You ain’t gonna believe this $!*&…” This video is of the Southern Fairy Tale variety. David Hobby, publisher of the wildly popular Strobist site, has a YouTube video of a recent shoot that can only be described as “insane”. Check out the rigging on the videographer as he films a kayaker doing even more insane things. I used to think racing my bicycle 200 miles across Death Valley was crazy but that was a piece of cake compared to this.

Sorry, I just learned the bad link was still active in this post.

Be Careful Out There…

I don’t normally post this stuff but I’ve received this scam e-mail three times over the past day and it seems to be targeting photographers so be careful. The body of the e-mail starts with something like this:

Hey, some jerk has posted your pictures (u understand what kind of pictures are there) and sent a link of them to all ur friends. I have already replied back. Said, that he is an idiot. See the link:

(link removed)

Miles Zavala

ScamDetective.com has a story about this scam. If you look carefully at the middle of the screen capture, you’ll see a file name PhotoArchive.exe. Never, ever, ever open a .exe file from any unknown source. For tht matter, don’t open .exe files from known sources. Do you really trust Uncle Ernie or Aunt Ruthie to recognize a malicious file?

The two tools I’ve used to protect myself for many years are Mailwasher from Firetrust and AVG from AVG.com. Mailwasher is cool because it let’s me “peek” at mail before I actually download it to my PC. If it looks suspicious, I delete it directly off my ISP’s mail server. It’s also heuristic meaning it learns your usage patterns so it can better detect things that don’t look right. AVG is an anti-virus program that’s been around for ages. It had a rough patch for a few years when it crashed systems but it’s now back on track and offers good protection without causing your PC to slow down. Both are available as free downloads for personal use.

While we’re on the subject, if you send me an attachment other than a .jpg image file, I’ll never see it because it’s automatically deleted.

Rick Sammon & Outdoor Photographer Show You How

Outdoor Photographer is one of the few magazines to which I subscribe. It’s always packed with useful articles and inspirational photos. In the past, their website was a bit of a hodge-podge but now they’ve made major improvements and it’s a regular stop for me. One of the cool new features is OPTV. Here’s a video by Rick Sammon that should be very useful for typical students of The Digital Photo Guy.

This is the basic level of photography that my students are seeking. If this is too simple for you, you’re probably too advanced for my classes.

The Digital Photo Guy Blog Gets a Facelift

This is the 6th year for this site. During the first 4 years, it was a static site that was rarely updated because making changes was excruciatingly slow, complex and costly. In 2008, I resolved to fix the problem and commissioned a web developer to develop a new site that I could easily and quickly update myself. He recommended WordPress and the initial implementation took just 6 weeks. As soon as he was done, I started making changes and quickly learned how to do just about everything by myself. I’m no rocket scientist but WordPress makes everything simple and straightforward.

Now, a year after the initial launch, a new static home page has replaced the previous dynamic home page. A dynamic home page was fine in the beginning but, now, with so many articles and posts, it was quickly becoming unwieldly. Readers couldn’t easily find the information they sought. A static home page can act as ”street signs” to help point readers in the right direction. As you can see, some of the signs are still not working. That’s because all the MMTs, posts and articles weren’t always correctly or fully tagged.

Tagging the material at this time would be counter productive because each update would generate an e-mail notification of an update and readers wuld be innundated with e-mails.

Starting in 2010, I’ll be more careful about tagging each MMT, post and article so readers can quickly find all material pertaining to Cameras/Lenses/Gear, Photo Editing and Photography.

In the meantime, the existing tags (right side of main blog) can help you find specific articles or MMTs. You can also use the Seach box along the right side of the main blog.

A website is a never-ending process. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment here. Good light, good memories and good luck in 2010.